Author Archives: jackfahey

In the tutorial today, we listened to a 20 minute radio show about the origins and impacts of the lobotomy. It was narrated by a survivor of the procedure.

We then examined this piece of work in order to break down the difference between Story Elements and Sonic Elements. The different aspects are as follows, with added clarification by me on each topic ;

Story Elements

• Focus/theme

  • what is the piece about in a succinct sentence

• Hook

  • what would the pitch to a producer be

• Plot

  • The story that evolves throughout the program

• Setting

  • where is it occurring. Not necessarily just where the narrative is located

• Conflict/tension/obstacles

  • Who are the villains?

  • Who opposes the main ideal/objective of the piece

• Characters

  • who is in the piece

• Mood

  • what is the feeling that the show creates

  • how does it make the audience feel

Sonic Elements

• Narrator

  • Who is telling us the story

  • What perspective are they using?

• Studio Interviews

  • interviews conducted within the confines of a studio

  • creates a very professional feel in the audience

• In Field/Location Interviews

  • Interviews shot at a location relevant to the interviewee or the content of the discussion

  • creates a raw feel

  • genuine

  • creates difficulties in sound editing later on

• Music (diagetic/nondiagetic)

  • what source is the music from? Is there a source within the world?

  • How does it feel?

  • What is its purpose?

• SFX

• Archival Sounds

  • previously recorded footage/found footage

• Location/ATMOS

  • sounds of the environment around the interview

  • just generally record lots to fill gaps

This topic has intrigued me since I begun my research on PB4. With attention spans being shorter than ever, how can content creators ensure to keep people interested once they click to their page? A lot of media creators offer deals/giveaways, advertise on bit social media pages or tag famous people/videos in order to draw in the crowd, but if the attention span has become so brief, how can these creators actually retain the audience they have drawn in?

One thing that has been studied more and more recently is eye movements while web browsing. Seeing where the eye is drawn to on the screen, and where to place the most important information on your website in order to get it to the consumer as quickly as possible. If you only have a few seconds to capture the interest of your reader, you need to get the important information in front of their eyes immediately after the page loads. You don’t want them searching for the info because if it isn’t found extremely quickly, they will move on.

Another way to solve this problem is spending the money and time on a good, clean interface. People who frequent the web can tell if a site is easy to navigate almost immediately and, going off my own experience, will just leave to find something else to browse almost immediately if either its difficult to find what they are looking for, or even if the site is just a bit rough on the eyes. When every second counts from the get go, first impressions are hugely important. It can make or break a websites ability to retain eyes for extended periods, thereby being a more attractive prospect to advertisers.

We have been given our groups for PB4 this week. But before we were able to work on that, we were given a workshop exercise for us to work through.

We had to conduct an interview with each other on why we like the RMIT city campus location. One of the constraints was recording the interviewee “interacting” with the environment during the interview. I found this particular task to be a little difficult while working with the medium of sound. Obviously in a video, thats an easy thing to do. But without visual clues its difficult to convey to the audience a person interacting with a university through sound, especially when you can’t use spoken word, because they are already talking, as they are answering the interview questions.

After we recorded our interview, we started to discuss our topic. We landed on the idea that we would explore social media/multiple media streams/multi tasking and its impact on the attention span/cognitive function/information retention of youth. Its a topic that is quite relevant to us, considering we are young people who use social media frequently.

Once I started researching the topic, I found a lot of it quite relatable. Even while just searching for articles that outline how bad multi tasking is for us, I was multi tasking by opening several tabs for searches, and simultaneously checking those. Also I was continuously checking my phone in between searches loading. I’d never really thought about the impact of multi tasking on my ability for information retention and how it affects my attention span, but its very noticeable almost immediately.

I think my initiative post will explore the impact of this on internet based content further.

The first half of the lecture this week we had a guest lecturer speaking about the importance of collaboration, both in our degrees, but also in terms of our future careers.

The lecture was focused around the key characteristics of collaborative work, and why it is valuable to employers in the media industry. There are barely any jobs that don’t involve a large amount of collaboration within the media world, so it is important to cultivate that skill while at university, in order to be appealing to future employers.

The characteristics stressed throughout the lecture (of good collaborative work) where;

• Respect
• Consistency
• Support
• Responsibility
• Equity

These 5 components are all vital for effective collaboration. I think that the two most important of these attributes are respect and equity. While all the skills are valuable, those two, in my opinion, need to come first. If everyone respects each other, and everyone shares the workload evenly, then there will at least be no cause of finger pointing once the assignment has been completed, and everyone will feel as though the contributions made were of equal importance.

The lecture also moved on to talk about group conflict resolution. The main point to be taken from that part was to use a consensus, rather than a majority rule. Using a majority will alienate one of the members, whereas finding compromise and coming to a consensus is the best way to keep everyone involved and satisfied with the end product.

The rest of the Lectorial was focused on Researching and Academic Referencing. I had already covered most of this in my first degree, but it was still nice to get a refresher in how to reference.

The concept of fandom was brought up in this weeks lecture, and I think it has an extreme relevance to the growing online sports community. Quality sports media content (such as articles, podcasts etc) will always be available online through established outlets, however one growing trend in the online sports world is fan created content. There are people with rabid interest in not only their teams, but also entire leagues in general. These fans have begun creating in depth content, both analytical and more broad, and posting them to various message boards such as reddit, or even their own free blogs. This content has started to rival even that of ESPN, TNT, FOX etc in terms of analytical depth in my opinion.

The reason for this shift is funding in my opinion. Case in point with ESPN having to fire 100 of their sports contributors because of cable cutting. The kinds of people they decided to let go were beat writers, analysts, in depth statistics driven content etc etc because it just doesn’t make enough money. The kinds of shows/presenters/journalists they kept were much more involved in click bait/”hot takes” content creation. This is the content that draws in casual fans who don’t really follow the sport in depth, so it is the bigger revenue stream as it has a larger appeal. The more in depth, analytical content is only aimed at avid sports fans, and so those fans have taken it upon themselves to pick up the slack. A lot of the more statistically driven sports content has become self published, which gives them a freedom to build their quality content at their own pace, without a big investor pushing to make it much more general and accessible to a less involved audience.
I could see this sort of content really pushing into the forefront of fandom consumption. I myself am a huge NBA fan, but I very rarely even bother to check the bigger sites like ESPN, TNT, FOX, NBC etc and solely focus on much smaller content studios, or free, fan made content. For the general public who don’t take a huge interest in the sport, it isn’t important, so I can’t see it becoming huge nationally produced, “big money” content. But I can definitely picture a new kind of media outlet that specifically caters to those who are heavily invested in the sport, possibly even without having anyone employed, simply contracting out their content to active members of the community who have enough time to create content about their areas of interest.

The lectorial this week (8) focused on audiences, which was actually quite fitting considering my interview with Josh Ladgrove was centred on the role an audience plays in comedy. Josh had a rather different view of audiences than the norm. In regular shows, the audience is a passive entity, watching the TV/live performance/whatever media they are consuming in full, and then reflecting upon it afterwards. However, much like the concept of “the people formally known as the audience”, the boundaries shift in his comedic shows. He uses the audience as an active participant in his productions. Similarly to the fandom audience, how they write fan fiction, enter contests etc etc, this goes even further. The audience actually becomes part of the show.

The lecture suggests that media practitioners accept that the “people formally known as the audience” new role. That they should welcome and integrate them into their content. I completely agree, having been to see Josh Ladgrove perform, being an active participant in the show as an audience member is thrilling.

Moving forward, I would attempt to think of a way to harness this active audience role in various other forms of media. Though to be honest, its hard to think of a way a big budget show could rely on such a variable concept. The show can be bad if an audience doesn’t bring it that night, and if there is a lot of money invested in this particular content, how willing are the producers/investors going to be to let the show ride on what kind of audience you have.

Starting off with the positives, the most successful part of the work in my opinion is the focus. I originally tried to just do an interview about comedy in general, but it was too broad and all over the place. Once I honed in and focused on a much more specific topic (the importance and role of the audience in Josh’s specific brand of improv comedy) I found it much easier to create not only a succinct video, but an interesting one. There’s no jumping around of topics, and there’s no distractions, it all fits together well, as its all quite specific to a singular theme.

Obviously that could also be a downside, if someone isn’t interested in the nuances of stand up comedy, and is just looking for some laughs, this probably isn’t going to hit with them. So it may narrow the audience a bit. But it still fills its niche well in my opinion.

In terms of what didn’t work, I needed better cut-aways. That was mainly due to inability to get access into the buildings due to licensing though, so not sure what else I could have done there. The lighting wasn’t good at all either, I had to work with the time I could get with him, and the inability to shoot inside to get good lighting, but still I should have found some way to shift the light source a little bit, its a bit harsh on his face.

I’d also say that I should have maybe used a third camera angle. I sort of edited in a second camera angle (close up) for the final seconds, but perhaps If I just shifted the camera around a bit and shot him side-on for a couple of answers, that could’ve added something interesting. It might be a tad visually bland.

Something I can take away from this is the importance of preparing for a much longer interview than you need. I shot an interview that went for 25-30 minutes, and only barely pulled together enough material on this one specific topic. Obviously you are constrained by how long the subject has to give you, but the more the merrier. If you ask lots and lots of questions about a whole variety of topics, it just gives you more canvas to work with and trim down into a neat 2-3 minutes. I think what I aimed for was 10 minutes of filming for every minute the final cut would be, but I could have asked even more questions.

I learnt a few things that can be extrapolated out to my development as a content creator. It was good to be able to get behind a proper camera for an extended period of time, I think I’d like to move into directing, so any time spent in that sort of a role will be great experience. Secondly, If I planned the specific style of interview early, rather than just kept the questions broad, I could have got a few more usable minutes.

Impromptu Laughter

Impromptu Laughter is a rare peak behind the visage of Neal Portenza, a character portrayed by Josh Ladgrove for hour long bewildering but hilarious shows.

In this weeks class, we were asked to create a film without editing. It was a good exercise to focus on actually planning what you are going to shoot before you shoot it. The cameras were still able to delete footage, which was an option unavailable in years past when shooting on film, but there was no editing done in post.

The exercise is obviously aimed to stop the age old adage of just getting a shot done and “fixing it in post”. But there’s also the problem that switching to digital provides, which is an endless amount of film. Nowadays, you can carry around so much memory with you, that it would be virtually impossible to run out of space while shooting a film. I think this creates a particular problem. It is much easier now to simply go out and shoot as much as you can, then rely on your editing to get something good. Having an extremely constrained amount of film to shoot on forced a director to be conscientious about what they filmed. I think this probably would have provided the editor with a much more focused and coherent narrative to work with.

I definitely need to start storyboarding/planning my work much more rigorously. Editing software is a great tool to put together the narrative, and create things with the pieces of film you have shot. But if the shooting is done without proper planning, there is only so much editing can do to create something meaningful. If the shooting is thoughtless, the editing cannot fix that. There’s also the problem of amount of content. If the director simply shoots as much as they can, it makes the editors job that much more difficult, as they have so much more footage to sift through and find good shots. However if the director is much more focused with his vision of the film, the editor will have an easier time collating it into something worth watching.